Dating site OkCupid admits to manipulating user profiles in several ‘experiments’

The dating site OkCupid admitted Monday to altering millions of user profiles in a series of experiments, including pairing up seemingly incompatible people with fake statistics about how well-matched they were.

In a blog post titled “We Experimented On Human Beings!” OkCupid founder Christian Rudder described three different trials the company had run on its unwitting lab rats.

“It’s not like people have been building [websites] for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better,” he wrote. “Experiments are how you sort all this out.

In the compatibility experiment, users were given inflated percentage scores representing how well they matched up with others. Users whose interests only matched 30 per cent were instead told they were 60 or 90 per cent matches. Unsurprisingly, those people were more likely to exchange messages.

The most successful pairs — those for whom single messages turned into full conversations — were still more likely to be good matches in reality, although the inflated numbers helped.

OkCupid results of a data experiment in which some users saw exaggerated compatibility scores. (OkCupid)

Two other experiments described in the blog post involved missing or removed profile photos, which led to the rather unsurprising conclusion that looks do in fact matter on an online dating service.

OkCupid is the latest major web company to talk openly about its data experiments. Earlier this year Facebook published results from a 2012 study it conducted on hundreds of thousands of users to gauge how different posts showing in people’s news feeds affected their moods and behaviour on the social network.

“We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook ‘experimented’ with their news feed,” OkCupid’s Rudder wrote Monday. “But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.”